Sony's PSN Targeted by Hackers Again
Part of a rough week for the hardware giant
It's unlikely those of you who own a PlayStation 3 (PS3) missed the massive security breach that struck Sony's online platform, the PlayStation Network (PSN) earlier this year. Well, get ready for some deja vu: the company was recently forced to lock down almost 100,000 user accounts after hackers tried to breach the system once again.
Back in the spring, Sony's PSN was the target of hackers who successfully accessed hundreds of thousands of user accounts. Personal information ranging from addresses and phone numbers to perhaps even credit card data was supposedly exposed in the attack. Sony took more than a month to fully restore functionality to PSN, and then followed the outage by offer PS3 gamers access to free games. All in all, an expensive month for the Japanese tech firm.
Now, it appears hackers are again after Sony. The company recently admitted it was forced to temporarily shut down 93,000 user accounts because of an evident spike in unauthorized attempts to access them. Apparently, hackers have been desperately trying to crack the code on these accounts since early last week.
The 93,000 people whose accounts were targeted are not suspects, but their accounts have been suspended by Sony until they agree to change their passwords. The company sent these individuals emails informing them that passwords need to be updated ASAP.
There's no doubt Sony acted quickly to prevent the problem from spreading, and the company took an opportunity last week to pat itself on the back. "We were able to move swiftly, and we believe very few accounts were actually accessed," said Satoshi Fukoka, a Sony representative.
Of course, many gamers won't be willing to congratulate Sony on a job well done. In fact, it's unlikely this will help PlayStation 3 sales, which have been rather disappointing this year. (The company's hardware sales have been low since the release of Microsoft's Kinect for the Xbox 360, prompting a price cut two months ago.) Clearly, Sony's PSN is being targeted a lot more than Xbox Live or the online platform for Nintendo's Wii.
And just when it seemed things were looking bad enough for Sony, the company also recently announced it had found a defect in its Bravia line of televisions. Apparently about 1.6 million of these flat screen sets are susceptible to overheating, smoking, and even the melting of internal parts.
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